Protect Vital Customer Data With Shredding Services In Chicago

Protect Vital Customer Data With Shredding Services In Chicago

So often the focus of document shredding is to protect sensitive business data but there’s another benefit to shredding that is just as important – protecting your customer’s data. A data breach can bring down a business for many reasons, including a perceived lack of protections of customer data. Shredding services in Chicago can help prevent that kind of disaster from ever happening.

Shredding Protects Everyone

Just think about the sheer amount of information that other businesses have about you personally and you can begin to understand exactly why a strong shredding policy is a good idea. From online retailers to doctors and hospitals to previous employers and companies you haven’t done business with in 10 years, they all have plenty of sensitive data on you. Likewise, you have plenty of sensitive data for your own customers.

It’s very easy for small and mid-sized businesses to skip the important step of document handling and protection thinking they’re not high profile enough to ever be the victim of a security attack. But security attacks and breaches can happen to any business at any time. In fact, many of them happen internally; unhappy employees or less than honest employees can easily access and use private data for their own reasons.

Protect data by adopting a document retention and destruction policy and then communicating that policy to your employees. Employees must understand their role in the plan before they can step up and be responsible for it. Employees should be able to communicate the basics of plan to any customer who asks how their private data will be used, stored, and protected. This will engender consumer confidence in your company.

Shredding Tips

Combined Resources Inc. (CRI) can help you develop a strong policy to protect sensitive customer data that includes our shredding services in Chicago. While cyber attacks gets all the attention, physical data breaches and security leaks can be just as devastating. Shredding can help reduce business risk by reducing or eliminating the amount of data that could be compromised in a breach.

Any of this information could be used to steal identities, which makes protecting it as high a priority as protecting your business’ IT servers. Use these shredding tips to create a strong data destruction policy:

Know The Law. Did you know that there are state and federal laws that govern document storage and destruction? Partner with a shredding service in Chicago that is familiar with these laws so you don’t have to worry about what to retain and what to shred and when and what can be retained electronically versus what must be kept in physical form.

Know Your Shredder. If you’re going to do the shredding yourself, know what kind of shredder you have. Some of them only cut papers into strips, which could be pieced back together by an industrious thief. Others, shred in two directions making it much more difficult to do this.

Shred Regularly. Establish a regular shredding schedule so you never miss a date or allow things to pile up. Shredding should be as second nature as backing up your servers.

Partner With CRI For Shredding Services In Chicago

You can save yourself the headache of shredding documents internally and keeping to a schedule by partnering with CRI for shredding services in Chicago. We’ll establish a schedule with you from the start and even provide you with secure bins where you can safely store documents that need to be shredded. Once the documents go into the bin, they don’t come out until we arrive on-site to destroy them. Shredding is done at your place of work so you know the data is destroyed before it even leaves your site.